How effective are new digital B2B loyalty-programmes?

Digital loyalty programmes, popular marketing instruments in the consumer market, are becoming a common tool for business-to-business marketers hoping to increase sales, reduce shipping costs and expand repertoire size. Extant literature, however, challenges their effectiveness on the basis that such programmes disproportionately reward heavy buyers. No attempt has yet been made to see if their online counterparts are successful in general or the same rules apply to B2B programmes in particular. The analysis is based on membership behaviour of corporates who purchase industrial machining goods from a large tools manufacturer in the US. Here conditional trend analysis (CTA) is used: an empirically-based mathematical model to analyse the buying rate of members in a succeeding period, based on their present buying class (heavy, medium, light and non-buyers). This study highlights similarities to the patterns of loyalty behaviour found in consumer markets. Managerial attention is drawn to CTA as a novice but a useful tool to test performance in this context; it is also ideal to be used in the absence of a pre-existing trend.